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“amateur” sport, #MarchMadness, and the Olympicshttps://victoriajacksonsports.com/2018/03/11/amateur-sport-marchmadness-and-the-olympics/
https://victoriajacksonsports.com/2018/03/11/amateur-sport-marchmadness-and-the-olympics/#respondSun, 11 Mar 2018 15:06:48 +0000http://victoriajacksonsports.com/?p=53Read More]]>On the surface, March Madness appears to have nothing to do with last month’s Winter Olympics. Athletes competing in the Games seem to come from a different world, materializing every two years on this global platform and then returning to wherever it is they train and compete. What may come as a surprise: the money that makes possible countless Olympic Dreams is revenue generated by college basketball players in the NCAA tournament each spring. We call this system that benefits “nonrevenue” athletes – athletes in Olympic sports – at the expense of “revenue” athletes – the basketball players – “amateurism.” And guess what? At times, nonrevenue and revenue athletes play by different “amateur” rules.

Take, for example, the American women’s hockey team that captured gold in Pyeongchang. Every athlete on the national team roster played or plays in the National Collegiate Athletic Association. NCAA women’s hockey is the developmental pipeline for Team USA. Their college championship tournament, the “Frozen Four,” is subsidized by the “Final Four.”

Student-athletes in nonrevenue sports like hockey obtain full scholarships, enjoy elite training environments and big-time competition, all courtesy of revenue generated, and redistributed across all college sports programs, by March Madness—about 1 billion dollars each year. As a runner at the University of North Carolina, I was fortunate enough to have been one of these subsidized athletes. Now I study the hypocrisy and corruption of college sports, how we got here, and how we might reform the system going forward.

Ironically, the Olympics offer a healthier model. The Games and the Final Four offer a striking contrast in the evolution of amateur sports, and the NCAA could stand to learn a thing or two from the Olympic Movement, instead of clinging to its absolutist insistence that college players not share in the fruits of their labor. The NCAA’s stance has facilitated an underground labor market, not unlike the Olympic operation employed by shoe companies – and fueled by sibling rivalry in the case of adidas and Puma – in the “shamateur” era of global athletics, the 1960s and 1970s.

Star college basketball players cannot sign endorsement deals, profiting off their valuable names, images, and likenesses. Instead their schools and coaches do. For much of its history, the Olympics included a similar amateur code prohibiting commercial endorsements, forcing athlete compensation underground. When Tommie Smith and John Carlos made their powerful podium protest at the Mexico City 1968 Games, their black-socked feet represented global poverty. But the athletes made sure to place their Pumas alongside them on the podium; both were receiving under-the-table payments with the understanding the shoe company would enjoy a return on investment—advertising on this televised, global stage.

The International Olympic Committee confronted the hypocrisy head-on. At the Baden-Baden Olympic Congress in 1981, delegates voted to remove the amateur code from the Olympic Charter and create the Athletes’ Commission. Despite doomsday predictions that professionalism would kill the Olympics—with the idea that athletes’ amateur purity was what made the Games compelling—they have obviously survived and thrived in the professional age.

While the Olympics abandoned amateurism, the NCAA doubled down, manipulating its amateur code to police athletes in the revenue sports for the benefit of athletes in the nonrevenue sports.

It isn’t just that some of us get a wonderful education and athletic experience, but some athletes are also able to leverage their college athletic regime into a profitable Olympic appearance. At the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympic Games American swimmer Katie Ledecky made six figures and returned to Stanford University’s swim team, her amateur eligibility intact.

This bifurcated system in American college sports also includes disparate educational experiences and outcomes, and, yes, the divide correlates with race. Those who benefit from collegiate amateurism are mostly white; those who do not – and, meanwhile, subsidize the educational and elite athletic experiences of the predominantly white Olympic athletes like the gold medalists in Pyeongchang – are disproportionately black.

And plenty of the Olympic athletes subsidized by college basketball and football programs compete for other nations. Our universities have eagerly recruited international athletes, who help teams win and help coaches – an increasing number of whom are also foreigners – keep their jobs. Like the Americans who beat them out for the gold, nearly the entire Canadian women’s hockey team is made up of past and present NCAA players. At the 2017 women’s hockey world championships, of the 184 athletes competing, 82 athletes representing 13 countries played or planned to play in the NCAA. And it’s not just the women; 82 Europeans played NCAA Division I men’s hockey in 2017.

According to the NCAA, more than 17,000 international athletes are currently playing sports – and almost always Olympic sports – at schools across the nation. That’s because the only place in the world that has, for better or for worse, a commercialized, amateur, billion-dollar sports industry is the United States. Our higher education system, to be precise.

Earlier this year, I wrote that we should understand the big-time college sports system as 21st-century Jim Crow. This is grander than an American tale. The Jim Crow divide in college sports reflects a global color line, with black American athlete labor subsidizing white American, European, and Commonwealth athlete privilege.

It’s time we revisit and redefine outdated, hypocritical notions of college amateurism, and come up with a consistent approach that doesn’t continue to exploit disproportionately black basketball and football teams, the ones earning the resources that allow everyone else to flourish.

In the short term, there is something we can do. Let’s start a movement to donate #MarchMadness bracket pool winnings to the players. Monies would be held in a trust until the athletes exhaust their collegiate eligibility, like Judge Claudia Wilken suggested in the O’Bannon case, and like the NGBs did for Olympic athletes in the transition out of amateurism.

If you decide to keep your winnings, remember this: you just made some cold hard cash while the players can’t. Enjoy the tourney!

]]>https://victoriajacksonsports.com/2018/03/11/amateur-sport-marchmadness-and-the-olympics/feed/0tarheelsundevilThoughts on UNC Response to NCAA’s 2nd Amended NOAhttps://victoriajacksonsports.com/2017/06/01/thoughts-on-unc-response-to-ncaas-to-2nd-amended-noa/
https://victoriajacksonsports.com/2017/06/01/thoughts-on-unc-response-to-ncaas-to-2nd-amended-noa/#respondThu, 01 Jun 2017 22:40:54 +0000http://victoriajacksonsports.com/?p=29Read More]]>I let the most recent UNC Response to the NCAA’s 2nd Amended Notice of Allegations, released last month, sit with me for the last couple weeks. I experienced many reactions, which overwhelmed to the point of white noise, and sensed that I needed to let them simmer. A mailing from UNC Athletics received in April, celebrating national title #43 to ask for $43, $430, or $4300, only added to the mix of muddled thoughts. This “43 Campaign” launched at the very same time UNC’s legal team worked to complete the Response, and I found it startling that Athletics would confidently include championships the University has the potential to lose. Did the Rams Club think about the implications of including the 2005 men’s basketball national championship? Do people in Athletics think about the 2005 men’s basketball team? I do, often. As a 2004 graduate, I attended concurrently with the athletes who earned that title, yet likely did not enjoy an educational experience comparable to mine. Those athletes deserve to keep that title, but does the University? And should Athletics include it in a campaign to solicit donations?

I am done simmering and will share some initial thoughts.

While the University’s purpose is to make the argument that the NCAA has no authority to declare and enforce penalties because no NCAA bylaws violations occurred, the ideas presented in the Response hold far-reaching implications. Are these assertions reflective of a consensus position on the nature and operation of athletic departments within higher education institutions? I doubt Carolina is going rogue.

I do not understand how the University is able to make the claim stated in Point 4 in the Introduction: “That no one in the Department of Athletics took improper advantage of the Courses. There is no allegation that any coach or employee of the Department of Athletics violated a bylaw or directed a student-athlete to take one of these courses.” There is much evidence to the contrary. Dan Kane and The News & Observer‘s tireless reporting, Jay Smith and Mary Willingham’s thoroughly-researched Cheated, and the email correspondence that has been released, show that Athletics personnel were attuned to the easy nature of some AFRI and AFAM courses and suggested athletes enroll in them. All one has to do is talk to a few student-athletes who attended UNC in the early 2000s (when I was there) to learn about academic advising practices within athletics. The attempt to distance the Academic Support Program for Student Athletes (ASPSA) from the Department of Athletics by noting that ASPSA academic counselors were employed by and reported to the College of Arts and Sciences is an exercise in semantics. (See pages 12-13.)

The amount of time and resources UNC has exhausted to fight the idea that systemic academic fraud existed is frustrating and angering. Wouldn’t it have been better, and honest and ethical, to stop resisting, admit the academic fraud also included people employed in Athletics, investigate to learn how this played out, and set up best practices going forward? Carolina could have owned this, and been the leader in the development of substantive reform, because, as the UNC Response implies, what happened at Chapel Hill likely goes on, to varying degrees, at other institutions. (See pages 20-27.) For me, the story within the scandal which encapsulates its tragic nature most powerfully is what happened to Rashad McCants when he came forward to talk about his schedule of classes during the spring 2005 semester when Carolina earned its first national title under Roy Williams. The image of Jay Bilas interviewing Williams with some of his former athletes standing behind him, some uncomfortably, as the coach threw McCants under the bus, is haunting.

As a point of comparison, my coach at UNC, Michael Whittlesey, had his Ph.D., taught one class each semester, and consistently asked about our coursework – in the office, on the run, while traveling to competition. He even attended a university orchestra concert when I played, as a show of support. Like Whittlesey, and all college coaches, Williams is an educator. His response to McCants, to bear down, mount a defensive campaign, and prioritize his well-being and job over the education of his players, is telling. That he called upon former players, some of whom were McCants’s teammates, to stand behind him, literally, in this case, is potentially exploitative, and should be embarrassing.

Also frustrating is one central line of argument in the Response: athletics and academics should be understood as separate, and should be treated separately. This idea runs throughout, but is more conspicuously expressed in Point 5 in the Introduction: “That the issues before this Panel were academic in nature and the result of inadequate academic oversight unrelated to the Department of Athletics.” (See also pages 11-12.) Sometimes this idea of separate spheres is valid; like, for example, the very important principle that academic units control curricular decisions. But more powerfully and damaging, it feeds into the problematic, overarching discourse that education exists in academic departments and sport exists in athletic departments. This dichotomy is legally dangerous, because the entire intercollegiate athletics system is predicated on amateurism, and what holds up amateurism is the idea that participating in college sports is educational. Furthermore, this line of binary thinking is what got us into this mess in the first place. Athletics should not exist separately and autonomously from the rest of the institution, unless universities decide to abandon amateurism and its accompanying tax-exempt educational nonprofit status, and professionalize. Higher education institutions should not be able to call college sports educational in some contexts and declare college sports separate from academics in other contexts. What the University may be doing here, by fighting the NCAA, is making both of them – the institutions and the membership association – vulnerable to looming legal challenges (Jenkins, etc.) to collegiate amateurism.

Postscript: You may wonder if I knew about the “anomalous courses” in AFRI/AFAM, especially since I was a student-athlete, and many of my friends were student-athletes, in 2000-2004, a high-water mark of the scandal. Despite the University’s strange decision to make the case that the courses were “widely known,” I did not learn about them until the scandal broke in 2011-2012. I contest the idea presented in the UNC Response: “The CWT Report supports that the Courses were generally available and states that the availability of the Courses was widely known across campus to all students through various means. ‘First, there was the general word-of-mouth network on campus. With up to 400 enrollments in some semesters, their existence was hardly a secret. As with any course that offers an easy path to a high grade, word of these classes got around.’” (See page 7.) Believe it or not, I, like many (most?) ambitious Carolina students, took the Honor Code very seriously, and operated on the (naïve?) assumption that the University took it very seriously, too. The Honor Code was posted in every classroom. Every blue book and scantron included a box with the code, which students read (presumably) and signed before turning in their work. At least I think the Honor Code was powerful and everywhere; now I question my memory. I am confident that I would have been the pesky student pounding on an administrator’s door, had I known about the “anomalous courses.” I reject the University’s (bizarre) position that the courses were widely known; I would have been one of countless bright-eyed and bushy-tailed do-gooder undergraduate students eager to report injustice. The offices in the Steele and South Buildings would have been overrun. Plus, practically speaking, if the courses truly were “widely known,” NC State students and fans would have learned about and exposed this fraud much earlier. I propose a more realistic framing: various clusters within the university knew about the “anomalous courses,” and Athletics most certainly was one of them.

Postscript 2: The UNC Response makes the argument that non-athlete students had equal access to “anomalous courses.” One form of subtext here is the idea that non-athlete students have not fallen under the same sort of scrutiny as student-athletes. This line of thinking is a non-starter. Athletes are used to being held to a higher standard. They crave excellence and strive for perfection on the field or court or track of play, and eschew mediocrity. Their academic performance is subjected to far more, and more frequent, scrutiny than the vast majority of non-athlete students. Athletes understand this; most embrace it. I am disappointed that my alma mater has decided to potentially harm perceptions of the quality of my education at what I felt was a top public university in the United States and world. More importantly, I am disheartened that many athletes were bamboozled by an institution of higher education that promised the quality of education I enjoyed.